A Photo Essay
Larry L. Dill's
New Hope Journal
Personal Essays and Public Opinions since 1979
August, 2005
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Paris to Provence, 2006
August 8, 2005
The recent cloning of an Afgan hound in South Korea brought to mind a New Hope Journal essay, “Dog Dancing on the Creek Bank,” which appeared originally in the Nacogdoches, Texas Sunday Sentinel in March, 1980. I suspect that Michael Blake (who wrote the screen play for Dances with Wolves) must have read my essay in the course of his writing the novel that the movie ( released in 1990) was later based on. Or maybe not. Dancing with wolves became a coda for Blake’s story of a “civilized” man going native. Such “back-to-nature” romanticism was at the core of the “back-to-nature” movement of the 1970’s of which The New Hope Journal was a product. A reprint of "Dog Dancing on the Creek Bank" appears in this issue of the New Hope Journal.
Lately--because together with my family, a trip to Paris and Provence is in the planning stages-- I have been reading all over the map of French history and culture, I stumbled across one of my old college “textbooks”, Rousseau’s “Confessions,” because I was searching for a connection between my own unquenchable pastoral romanticism via Thoreau and a French connection. It had never occurred to me before that Rousseau was not only the father of the French Revolution but of the “back-to-the-land” movement of the American 1970’s as well. Rousseau’s Confessions has another connection to this month’s issue of the Journal in that it may well be one of the most candid autobiographies of all time and my own literary struggles have always revolved around what I thought I could or could not say in print about how my life has gone. I was gently chastened, for example, (with due justification) by my first wife (in our first correspondence in nearly 30 years) for my portrayal of our marriage in “What did you do in the war Daddy?”
Reading in a New Yorker article by Jonathan Rosen about the odd career of Henry Roth the other day, I realized how convoluted and unconventional a writer’s life (or anybody’s life) can be. But I was struck more, though, by Rosen’s glib assessment of Roth’s writing problem as “writer’s block.” That reminded me of my own career as a “blocked writer” and of an essay I wrote for the Austin Writer which appeared on the front page in the February, 1988 issue. Without my permission, though, they had changed the original title from “In Defense of the Blocked Writer” to “In Defense of Silence,” almost exactly the opposite of the intent of the essay. I reprint that article here this month as well.
And finally, the other connection for “Dog dancing” in our time is Becky Johnson’s series of articles over the last year or so in the Smoky Mountain News here in Waynesville, North Carolina, having to do with Waynesville’s water supply and the 8600 acres of forest land that provides the watershed for it. The local political debate is focused on the issue of whether or not the pristine watershed forests above Waynesville should be “managed” (which many feel to be a euphemism for “logged”) or whether the watershed should be left “forever wild.” I’ll have more to say later about the current debate. For now I refer you to my article of last year on this topic at “Undo these Hills: Thinking Globally and writing locally,” which lays out in detail the environmental issues involved. Here following are the New Hope Journals of Yesteryear, “Dog Dancing on the Creek Bank,” and “In Defense of the Blocked Writer.” Laying the rock at Rockledge is occupying most of my time these days as is my research for the Paris Blog. In this last regard I have included the only poem I have ever written about Paris, "Cinema Verite." The Paris of my mind.
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Larry L. Dill
Dog Dancing on the Creek Bank
In Defense of the Blocked Writer
Thinking Globally and Writing Locally
Cinema Verite
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Copyright 2005 by Larry L. Dill
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